Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

Travelling by bicycle is a life of simple things taken seriously: hunger, thirst, friendship, the weather, the stutter of the world beneath you.

— Kate Harris / Land of Lost Borders: Out of Bounds on the Silk Road

I thought my teeth would explode
but you brought something for both of us
and we sat on the ground and ate it together

— Jim Dine / “Bean”

In Amsterdam, as in Paris, no one is quite certain why or how so many bicycles wind up in the water. City officials ascribe the problem, vaguely, to vandalism and theft. Alcohol surely plays a role, and there could well be a kind of ecosystem at work: a bicycle is pulled from the canal and recycled into a beer can, whose contents are guzzled by an Amsterdammer, who, weaving home at the end of a dissipated night, spots a bicycle and is seized by an impulse to hurl the thing into a canal.

— Jody Rosen / Two Wheels Good: The History and Mystery of the Bicycle

We borrow from the land what we can but cannot
return to it: bluestem, coneflower, boneset, broomcorn,
a ring-necked pheasant tied to a pole, a flat stretch of land
we strip and tar and pave, a creek that gets deeper
as it downrivers, its edges spoiled with runoff.

— Sarah McCartt-Jackson / “Borrow”

A 2022 report predicted that crop yield failures in the world’s “breadbaskets”, such as Canada, the US and China, will be 25 times greater by 2050 than they are today.

— Bill McGuire / “46C SUMMER DAYS AND ‘SUPERCELL’ STORMS ARE BRITAIN’S FUTURE – AND NOW IS OUR LAST CHANCE TO PREPARE” / Cool Earth, Substack

Look at you, chopping and weeping. Idiot.
Is this the way you go through life, your mind
A stopless knife, driven by your fantasy of truth . . .

— Suji Kwock Kim / “Monologue for an Onion”

In restricting the range of directions you can travel, in charging ordinary movement with momentum, a bike trip offers that rarest, most elusive of things in our frenetic world: clarity of purpose. Your sole responsibility on Earth, as long as your legs last each day, is to breathe, pedal, breathe and look around.

— Kate Harris / Land of Lost Borders: Out of Bounds on the Silk Road

What I’m Listening To:

To avert this unholy evolutionary trajectory
Can you hear what I hear, babe?
Does it make you feel afraid?

— Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds / “Abattoir Blues”